Arizona-based solar technology company Erthos, the inventor of Earth Mount Solar PV, has signed an agreement for a 100MWdc+ utility-scale PV installation in Texas. It is the company’s largest contract to date.
The agreement was made with Industrial Sun, an Austin, Texas-based renewable energy and energy storage developer with a delivered portfolio of over 6GW across the US.
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Industrial Sun said that, due to the physical constraints of the project, conventional solar modules would not be suitable to fulfil the required capacity. Ground-mounted modules, placed flat directly onto the ground, do not require the spacing that fixed-tilt modules do. Erthos also said that it can recoup the increased output that a tracker provides, which it placed around 20%, by being able to deploy 20% more modules over a smaller area.
Erthos claims that its Earth Mount technology can offer an energy density over double that of a typical utility-scale system.
The company said that its earth-mounted modules lower the levelised cost of energy of utility-scale solar, as well as providing advantages in land availability and interconnection costs. The modules are cleaned by a specifically designed autonomous robot.
“Erthos technology allows us to maximise our project capacity, particularly in those areas where our projects are land-constrained,” said Wade Gungoll, managing director of Industrial Sun.
Last month, Erthos announced a memorandum of understanding for a 107MW project with an undisclosed US developer, along with 14MW of smaller-scale contracted projects.
In March the company closed US$17.5 million in funding to expand its active project pipeline to 2.5GW.